Projection mapping is one of the most impressive uses of AV technology. It brings static surfaces alive, transforming curved and flat areas alike into vibrant, moving canvases that tell amazing stories.

The organizers of the LUMA Projection Arts Festival used this technique to turn Binghamton, NY’s buildings into a ballet of light. AV tech helped to integrate art, visual storytelling, and music into a single immersive experience.

The festival has been running since 2015, but the 2023 event was the most innovative yet. Visual artists used projection mapping to create interpretive works across the city, designing effects that seemed to warp the physical structure of the underlying buildings before the audience’s eyes.

Conducted over a weekend, the outdoor project faced multiple challenges, including variable weather conditions and energy usage. Projecting onto massive surfaces also called for powerful light and high-resolution images. That’s why the organizers chose Panasonic Connect’s powerful laser projectors that are renowned for their reliability, resilience, and razor-sharp imagery. The projectors were simple enough to allow installation by local IT employees.

The 2023 event’s projection projects included a jazz-inspired instrumental landscape and a project that transformed a solid stone edifice monument into a living narrative. Another exhibition took attendees on a journey across alien landscapes projected onto columns at SUNY Broome Culinary and Arts Center.

Nothing can completely reproduce the deep emotions that affected those who lived through WWII. Nevertheless, the National WWII Museum in New Orleans is taking its best shot. Through a new exhibition, Expressions of America, the museum is using projection mapping to bring history to life through vivid imagery and sound projected onto its buildings.

Narrated by long-time veteran advocate Gary Sinise, the exhibition brings the history of WWII home to a new generation of visitors via an immersive visual medium. It uses personal accounts from American soldiers, along with civilians on the home front, to tell the stories of individuals who lived through the war.

“We wanted to celebrate individual stories from wartime in an inventive way,” said Bob Farnsworth, the museum’s senior vice president of Capital Programs. “We wanted to help people understand how the history of World War II is still relevant today by using a new medium that would appeal to audiences of all ages, but especially engage younger audiences who are driven by visual storytelling.”

The museum used eight Panasonic Connect laser projectors in all. Six PT-RQ50KU projectors, one PT-RQ22KU, and one PT-RQ32KU delivered vivid imagery on the pavilions and across the impressive canopy that overlooks them. The exhibition transported over 700 guests back in time on Veterans Day, honoring the contributions of people and families throughout the war.

The pandemic changed the face of work everywhere, ushering in a new era of hybrid work, where people use office space in innovative ways. Companies are rethinking their office spaces to be more flexible, accommodating staff who are constantly on the move.

Increasingly, employees are spending time at home to focus on solo work while coming into the office to meet and interact with their colleagues. When they meet, teams also want to connect more seamlessly with staff working remotely. This desire is prompting offices to level up their conference spaces and provide more sophisticated facilities that allow staff to have more intuitive, higher-quality business collaboration sessions wherever they are.

Avison Young, which manages the Manulife Plaza in Los Angeles, went all-in when adapting to this change in working patterns by creating a state-of-the-art business collaboration and conferencing facility on its third floor. In partnership with Sherman Design Group and ClearTech, the project used a selection of Panasonic cameras, displays, and projectors to provide an intuitive conferencing experience for groups of varying sizes.

The installation included two ceiling-mounted AW-UE40W PTZ cameras and a portable tripod-mounted AW-UE20K camera. Conference organizers can use a combination of these cameras to divide the space into separate rooms.

To relay high-resolution video, the design team chose a 65-inch TH-65SQE1W display attached to a lift and a PT-RCQ80WU7 DLP laser projector for bright, high-resolution engagement.

The design team also opted for 16 loudspeakers and an eight-channel Wireless Microphone System, including lavalier, handheld, ceiling, and gooseneck microphones, to pick up crystal-clear sound from around the room.

The cohesive AV and design created a flexible, consistently engaging space for meeting experiences, demonstrating how a thoughtful combination of sound and vision can prepare building users for a new era of hybrid business collaboration.

With almost a billion people globally watching esports in 2022, this fast-moving digital competition has become a big industry. The player demographic skews young, creating opportunities for higher and further education institutions to factor it into their student activities. This prompted The University of Southern California to open a new Digital Creative Lab facility in 2023 as an esports arena that quickly evolved into a multi-disciplinary creative hub. Thanks to this state-of-the-art gaming and multimedia production facility, the university’s Trojans esports team has a high-tech home.

The lab features sophisticated AV technology to support a wide variety of activities ranging from esports to podcasts and digital video creation. The main collaboration room can stream via an AV-over-IP system to other screens, enabling organizers to create a virtual esports arena for these popular events.

USC chose Panasonic Connect’s KAIROS digital video production system to help handle streaming during live production because it interacts seamlessly with other vendors’ equipment for audio and video streaming.

While the lab supports a range of student activities, esports participants need specific AV capabilities. For these fast-paced players, every frame of game action counts. That calls for high frame rates, which, in turn, requires low-latency video. This crowd cannot afford to wait while the IP network catches up. That’s why rock-solid AV tech that worked seamlessly in a multi-vendor environment was a key requirement.

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A Year of Visual Transformation

Panasonic Connect offers an entire ecosystem of advanced AV technology to support world-class installations like these. Our systems handle everything from the ingestion of sound and video to its mixing in live event production and its razor-sharp display in vibrant, bright colors.

Whether celebrating a beautiful city, learning thoughtful lessons about the sacrifices borne by an entire nation, or escaping into some fast-paced competitive entertainment, these sophisticated solutions can change the way we think about our work, our lived environments, and each other.